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Information visualization and sonorification
Displaying complexes of problems, strategies, values and organizations
The Union of International Associations is faced with a major challenge of how to provide greater insight into complex networks of relationships amongst international organizations, world problems, strategies in response to them, human development and human values. Extensive databases are maintained on each of these sets of entities. There are (hyper)links between the entities in each set, and between entities in different sets. Anthony Judge, currently the Director of Communication and Research of the UIA, has had a long-term interest in information visualization. Already in 1971 he produced a 16mm film about the work of the UIA in this field. The short document (9'03") has now been converted to RealVideo format and is available here: Visualization of Organization. (If you don't have it yet, you can download a free Real player here.) In the on-line form of these databases (http://www.uia.org/db/), users have access to several different kinds of on-going experiment. These are as follows:
A selection of earlier experiments using virtual reality to display complexes of problems and organizations is presented (elsewhere). These structures were generated in 1997 as static pages (in contrast to the dynamic generation of structures above). It is planned to continue experiment with some of the visual metaphors used there. Users may experience some difficulty and frustration in getting virtual reality browser plug-ins to work correctly. An additional irritation in relation to the virtual reality experiments above is that they were done using the earlier (simpler) version of the VRML language (version 1), whereas current browsers work with the later version (version 2) and are not necessarily faithful in their reproduction of version 1 colour values. This adds to the colour unfriendly nature of the differences between browsers. It is hoped to develop the experiments with the additional facilities of VRML 2. It must be stressed that these visual experiments are designed to find ways of representing, comprehending and exploring complexity. The purpose is to provide sophisticated techniques which generate structures that are visually interesting in their own right but raise interesting questions about what they are able to represent and how they might be developed. It is a deliberately intention to give the user as much control as possible in exploring these structures creatively. The intention is also to make this process as interesting to academic researchers, students, the media, and to those concerned with formulating more appropriate policies in a complex society. For further discussion see papers written by UIA staff members and associates in their personal capacity: Links to relevant external resources: |
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), and
are self-organizing. The highly dynamic map displays can be radically
manipulated and reconfigured by the user. The display technique is
based on a Java applet developed by Gerald de Jong (